The Australian History Curriculum rightly considers students learning about their pop cultural heritage an important thing. Recently I have been thinking about this, particularly when my 1980s and 90s movie references are unknown to my Year 10 students. So I asked my Facebook friends which movies do they believe a young person should watch before their teens. I will endeavour to show my almost 12 year old daughter as many of these that she has not seen before her 13th birthday next July. This will help prepare her for important things like recognising movie quotes from 30 somethings.

Movies recommended that she has seen.

Princess Bride – We are actually going to be in a play inspired by this movie next month.

The NeverEnding Story – We first showed this to her when she was about 8, she was a little scared but enjoyed it.

The food additive project while not an outstanding success was a useful way to help students get a context for organic chemistry. Like many projects given to students this one was not time managed well. One of my biggest disappointments was not being able to have an Expo where the students presented to others from the class and other science classes. If I use this project or a modification of it next year I will endeavour to make the learning more “just in time” so that it has more relevance to the students and to encourage them to work on the project in a more steady manner to enable the presentation of work at the end of term.
If you have any questions put them in the comments and I will try to answer them as soon as possible.

I have been working some more on my PBL on Food additives. Here are the files I have produced. Any feedback is appreciated. Here are PDF files of my two working documents. I will let you know how it works.

In fourth term last year I had the opportunity to work with David Price to look at Project Based Learning. (Check out the Buck Institute for Education to learn more). While looking for ways to engage my Stage 1 Chemistry Students with Organic Chemistry I hit on the idea of a PBL looking at Food Additives. These students have been involved in a number of project based learning opportunities during their high school years. The idea of this project is to have students creating information presentations to help reduce misinformation about food additives amongst the student and school community. While I am still in the planning stage I am excited to see how well it works. If you have any thoughts or ideas let me know.

This term the Year 9 students in my school are studying WWI as their Australian Curriculum History depth study. For science we are looking at Physical Sciences. This is my attempt to link the two.

Students will undertake a practical lesson for five of the six weeks of this course. In the sixth week they undertake the research task. Each week they will also undertake one of the video comprehension question sheets. There are 3 sub topics, Electricity, Light and Waves.
We are trying to move away from the “science lecture” that I have observed in other schools and I was taught with in the 1990s while still covering the Australian Curriculum outcomes. In my opinion it is especially important to link to outcomes about Science as Human Endeavour and Science Inquiry, not just the Science Understanding.

At a workshop with David Price OBE on education engagement my table were challenged to come up with 6 values for our school from a selection of 12, we summarised them in two.
1. Our school will become a community focused on the students who will known as individuals in their own family and social context. We will involve and encourage teamwork between staff, students, parents and community mentors.
2. Our school will integrate curriculum subjects through rigorous project based learning incorporating objective real world assessment.
So what do you think?